Dr Anthony Neal - orcid.org/0000-0002-5512-7901
American Philosophical Association Fellow, May - July 2023
Home Institution: Mississippi State University
Anthony Sean Neal is a Beverly B. and Gordon W. Gulmon Humanities Professor at Mississippi State University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion and a Faculty Fellow in the Shackouls Honors College of Mississippi State University. He also has an affiliation with the department of African American Studies. He is a 2019 inductee into the Morehouse College Collegium of Scholars and a Fellow with the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought. Dr Neal has also been selected as a Visiting Research Fellow for the Warburg Institute, a unit of the School for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Dr Neal received his doctorate in Humanities from Clark Atlanta University. He also received his Master of Divinity degree from Mercer University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Morehouse College. Dr Neal is the author of three books. The first is Common Ground: A Comparison of the Idea of Consciousness in the Writings of Howard Thurman and Huey Newton (Africa World Press, 2015). The second book is entitled Howard Thurman’s Philosophical Mysticism: Love Against Fragmentation (Lexington, 2019). Dr Neal’s latest book project project, “A Freedom Gaze: Philosophical Grounding for The Modern Era of the African American Freedom Movement,” will be released by Lexington Press (September 2022). He serves on the editorial board of The Acorn: Philosophical Studies in Pacifism and Nonviolence.
Project Title: Violent Abstractions
Dr Neal’s project, tentatively entitled, “Violent Abstractions,” focuses on the rise of Scottish skepticism and its relation to the coincident rise of a dismissive attitude toward the intellectual abilities of Africans. His specific focus will be the Scottish Enlightenment in general, and Hume more specifically, in an effort to better understand how skepticism and Hume’s use of abstraction as a philosophical tool made space for racism to flourish as an existential crisis to which little philosophical attention was given. The goal is to make use of the resources of the University of Edinburgh and, especially, the Institute Project on Decoloniality. He will use his visit to Edinburgh to read much of the philosophical literature written during the period in question in order to assess any problematic shifts of reason. Dr Neal also looks forward to conversations with other Fellows of the institute.